Abstract
In an ongoing debate between International Political Economy (IPE) and International Political Sociology (IPS), the question of technology provides an important entry point. For a number of decades, oil posed both security and economic issues. Today, we find ourselves at a point where information is about to replace oil as the most valuable resource. Whereas dominant (liberal) accounts of current technological transformations insist on the democratising potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), both IPE and IPS scholarships can contribute to critically analyse power relations in the digital age.
First, they both study the role of elites in contemporary capitalism. The study of elites contradicts the argument that the Internet makes communication and the exchange of information more horizontal and stresses the dominant position of some actors in the digital age. Second, both traditions explore the role of imaginaries as social production of intersubjective meanings with material supports that make sense for everyday actors out of complex economic and technological realities.
A robust dialogue between IPS and IPE based notably on these two concepts allow for a critical perspective on the digital age that problematises technology both in material and discursive terms instead of taking it for granted; and uncovers power asymmetries in technological evolutions.
Hierarchies in the digital era: IPS and IPE contributions to the study of elites
The digital world emerges from a convergence of information and communication flows towards a digitalised form and a specific transportation protocol: the TCP/IP, or Internet protocol suite. 1 Compared to most telephone and early data transportation networks, the resulting network – the Internet – is decentralised, owned by a multitude of operators, and offering a wide variety of routes for the transportation of packets of information. Based on this technical evolution, mainstream liberal perspectives on the digital era emphasise the horizontal nature of communication over the Internet and their consequences in terms of economic opportunities and political empowerment. However, the analogy between a decentralised network and a horizontal governance is flawed on two grounds. First, although the technology theoretically presents – and has historically evidenced – a decentralised nature that could allow for the interconnection of small hosts, the current map of the network evidences a number of centres dominated by highly connected servers and a lot of peripheries. 2 Second, the analogy between a technical architecture and a complex political economy is inaccurate since a distributed and horizontal communication network does not necessarily imply a democratic and equalitarian governance. The current political economy of the digital world is oligopolistic and based on vertical power relations. 3
Against this background, the traditional research question of elite sociology, namely ‘who governs?’ seems to be a necessary starting point to analyse power relations in the digital era. Given the transnational nature of cyberspace, the analysis necessarily implies a focus on transnational power elites 4 that exercise power beyond national boundaries in the global political economy. The focus on elites embraces different sources of power and includes different types of actors. While Weberian elites rely on national and international institutions, financial elites draw their power from capital flows, and technical elites from their expertise. The sociology of elites is particularly well suited for the analysis of multistakeholder settings that are the preferred mode of governance in the digital world. Indeed, multistakeholder governance gather on the same footing representatives of different types of actors, including states, intergovernmental organisations, civil society organisations and businesses. Rather than focusing on one powerful actor, the sociology of elites makes possible a more comprehensive analysis of transnational elite networks, both formal and informal.
The concept of transnational elites lies at the crossroads between IPE and IPS. In the last decade, sociological and political economic analysis have tended to come closer as sociologists increasingly moved from a Weberian institutional definition of the elite towards a more flexible one. 5 Authors have shown the close relationship between the increasing power of elites and financialisation. 6 The study of elites in global capitalism, and especially in digital capitalism, requires the identification of the loci of power in the global political economy of the digital era, and an analysis of the social sources and manifestations of this power.
Taking technology seriously: imaginaries of the digital age
The study of the imaginaries that accompany current technological and economic transformations is another venue for the dialogue between IPS and IPE. Two strands of literature have recently built upon the concept of imaginary: the work, notably by Jasanoff and Kim 7 on socio-technical imaginaries in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the reflections on hegemonic imaginaries in (international) cultural political economy. 8 STS have increasingly contributed to IPS debates, notably through the introduction of Actor-Network Theory. 9 More recently, authors like McCarthy 10 acknowledged the potential contribution of Jasanoff’s work in STS to a critical theory of technology in International Relations.
STS contribute to a new understanding of the role of technology in global politics through the effort to overcome the technology/society divide. In other words, the material infrastructure needs to be analysed together with the social superstructure instead of assuming the prevalence of one or the other. 11 Contrary to the mainstream accounts described in the previous section, this type of analysis avoids determinisms. Moreover, certain strands of STS address global power relations and the ideational dimension of technology.
For example, the language of co-production emerged within STS to reject both technological and societal/economic determinisms and to focus on the complex relationship between science/technology and society. The production of science and technology is a process that cannot be disentangled from the production of social norms and hierarchies. 12 Understanding the digital age thus requires the simultaneous analysis of both the reproduction and emergence of dominant actors, and the analysis of the ‘often invisible role of knowledges, expertise, technical practices and material objects in shaping, sustaining, subverting or transforming relations of authority’. 13 Algorithms, 14 Internet Exchange Points 15 and the technical expertise of the ‘fathers of the Internet’ 16 are among the elements that embody and reshape the power of the transnational elites described in the previous section.
The analysis of the knowledges and discourses that surround actors, practices and the material objects can be brought one-step further by trying to describe coherent imaginaries that give sense to technological change. Socio-technical imaginaries can be defined as ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understanding of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’. 17 These visions of how technological change is transforming the social world provide a coherent framework in which different technological trends (e.g. social media, big data, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, etc.) all participate to a broader project, the advent of the digital age.
The description by Jasanoff and Kim of socio-technical imaginaries echoes the work in cultural political economy on hegemonic imaginaries. Imaginaries as defined by Sum and Jessop ‘are semiotic systems that frame individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or inform collective calculation about that world’. 18 Here, from an IPE perspective, imaginaries are not (necessarily) related to technology but they also frame different experiences within a coherent whole. Cultural political economy builds upon a tradition of critical political economy in order to describe hegemonic imaginaries in contemporary capitalism, such as the Knowledge-Based Economy. 19 However, a dialogue with STS helps acknowledge the essential role that technology plays in current economic imaginaries. In the digital age, technology is not only a mean to an end. It participates fully to our understanding of the world, and to how we envision desirable futures.
These coherent imaginaries are essential in the sense-making processes of everyday actors. They also shape and legitimate technological changes and social transformations. Thus, from a critical perspective on the digital age informed by both IPS and IPE, the study of how imaginaries emerge, compete with one another and become hegemonic is crucial. Moreover, these imaginaries are closely related to the analysis of the transnational elites described in the first section, as they tend to legitimate the power of certain actors and present certain evolutions that might benefit them as inevitable.
Conclusion
A robust dialogue between IPS and IPE is necessary to provide a critical perspective on the transformations at work in the emerging digital age. This contribution outlines two concepts that emerge from such dialogue. First, an identification of the (new) transnational elites of the digital age is necessary to counter the horizontal network / digital democratisation discourse that still influences mainstream accounts of the digital age. Second, in order to avoid a societal/economic determinism that sometimes characterises critical perspective on technological change, it is important to take technology seriously and to analyse both the material infrastructure of the digital age and the imaginaries that are connected to, and partly shape, our understanding of technological change.